The Shrinking Subject

Microsoft is a conversational black hole. Drop the subject into the middle of a room and it sucks everybody into a useless place from which no light can escape. --Don Norman

Monthly columns about volatile
industries are always risky, because you write them a month or two
before they come out. This means every topic is a gamble that the
world two months hence won't be much different than right now. This
time, I'm betting on a real long shot: that when you read this,
Microsoft will still be one company—and will eventually prevail
against the government's antitrust case. I'm also betting on a much
more sure shot: that the trial's outcome won't matter much to the
world we're building on open-source infrastructure.

Microsoft is a risky subject in any case, but it's especially
risky when you have anything nice to say about them and your
audience is a bunch of Linux folks. It's like going to Miami to
talk up Fidel. So I'll try to be as rational and brief as I can, at
least about the nice stuff.

I'll start by positing a thesis: that Microsoft's success has
many good reasons and one bad one. All the good reasons reduce to
orthodox marketing, which is not about “delivering messages” and
“capturing eyeballs”, but rather about finding what customers
want and giving it to them, even if it's talking paper clips. The
bad reason is behavioral. Microsoft is often brutal, to its
partners as well as its enemies.

The first reason explains the success of Microsoft's two
cornerstone product families, Windows and Office. Both are what you
get when a large, aggressive desktop software company does what
orthodox marketing demands (in the words of Theodore Levitt):
“satisfy the customer, no matter what.” For decades, Microsoft
took that advice to a whole new level, while its opponents ignored
it.

In 1996, when I spoke at a small retreat of computer industry
types, my topic was “Markets are Conversations” (which later
became the first thesis of The Cluetrain
Manifesto). In that talk, I said Microsoft succeeded by
being the only leading PC software company that made sure customer
feedback informed—and even drove—engineering. Afterwards, one of
Microsoft's top people took me aside and said, “That's the first
time I've heard us credited with Marketing 101.” In fact, he said,
“we do it to a fault.” That's why “Excel is full of stuff that
exactly one customer asked for.”

Later, an Apple executive told me, “we hate our users.
That's why we try to scrape them off on resellers.” Then he told
me the story of a frustrated tech support group that chartered an
airplane from Austin to San Jose, drove to Cupertino and presented
the CEO with a long list of product faults that users complained
about and engineering never fixed.

Bear in mind that both Microsoft's and Apple's true customers
are intermediaries (resellers and OEMs), not users. That means
listening to those users is highly optional. Microsoft deserves
credit for at least being curious, whether or not their tech
support sucked. (I should add that I never got poor tech support
out of either Microsoft or Apple.)

Later, when I consulted a Seattle company that had a close
working relationship with Microsoft, they agreed that Microsoft did
a good job of closing the loop between tech support and
engineering. But they added this: “Since so many tech support
calls come from dumb users, you get dumb features.” Exhibit A: the
talking paper clip. This also squares with Steve Jobs' four-word
indictment of Microsoft: “they have no taste.” (Which says as
much about Steve as it does about Bill.)

So how could a company that listens so closely to users fail
to understand the antitrust rules by which increasingly dominant
companies are supposed to compete?

Because Microsoft isn't just a competitive company. It's a
combative one. There's a huge difference. Competitive companies
conceive of business in terms of sports. Their conceptual metaphors
are “business is sports” and “markets are playing fields”.
Combative companies conceive of business in less-civilized terms.
Their conceptual metaphors are “business is war” and “markets
are battlefields”.

By these metaphors, “competitiveness” and “combativeness”
mean very different things, even though both use nearly identical
vocabularies. Both will “attack”, “defend”, “flank”,
“command”, “dominate”, “control”, “retrench” and so on. But
the concepts are very different. That difference is both subtle and
absolute:

In sports, fairness is all. In war, all is
fair.

Sports is full of rules. War has no rules. (Ask the
people of Sarajevo and Hiroshima.)

Playing fields are always level. Battlefields are
rarely level.

Sports is civilized. War is barbaric.

Sports end with victory or defeat—but both sides
live to play again. Wars end with triumph and dominion or death or
surrender.

Business is not regulated by rules of war. The
“competitiveness” about which business law speaks does not
comprehend the right of one company to “cut off the air supply”
of another—unless, of course, it's “fair”. Microsoft tried
mightily in The Trial to convince Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson
that the computer and Internet worlds were battlefields, and that
every competitor's very existence was under constant threat.
Microsoft failed because Judge Jackson and the entire regulatory
system conceive of business as sports, not war. There was no way
Jackson could buy Microsoft's argument. There are rules for
competition, especially between monopolies and less-advantaged
companies. Microsoft broke them. And Judge Jackson's response was
to break Microsoft. Literally.

To a combative company like Microsoft, a breakup is a death
penalty and utterly unacceptable. But Judge Jackson doesn't have
the final power to execute Microsoft, which belongs to the appeals
court or the Supreme Court. He does, however, have the power to
save Microsoft, if he makes enough mistakes.

It is significant that throughout this whole ordeal,
Microsoft has refused to settle, or even to admit the obvious fact
that they play hardball. This was especially obvious during one of
the trial's most ludicrous moments: when Robert Muglia, a Microsoft
executive, insisted that when Bill Gates wrote that he was
“hard-core about NOT supporting” a hunk of Java technology, the
words meant something other than what they said. Jackson bought
none of it, and finally yelled “No!” and “Stop!” at the
witness. “By asking the judge to swallow such absurdities as
Muglia's testimony,” wrote Joe Nocera in
Fortune, “Microsoft instead gave Jackson an
excuse to swallow nothing.”

This looked like Muhammad Ali's rope-a-dope strategy to me.
Stay on the defensive, dodge constantly, and look for the other guy
to make mistakes. The prosecution had more than the burden of proof
here; they had the burden of their own rules. If they broke enough
of them, Microsoft reckoned, the final ruling would go to the
defendant. Indeed, Microsoft attorneys have said for some time that
they expected to win on appeal.

But this isn't just a story about Microsoft. It's also about
Netscape. The judgment against Microsoft was based mostly on that
company's behavior toward Netscape, whose air supply Microsoft
allegedly wished to cut off. Nobody, however, including Microsoft,
gives due credit to Netscape for choking itself. Or to the press,
for covering “The Browser War” as anything but a sports
event.

True, Microsoft really was out to hurt Netscape. I remember
Jim Clark, onstage at the first Netscape conference in 1996,
responding to a question about “polarizing” remarks made by
Netscape people about Microsoft. “They're out to kill us!” Clark
yelled back. “That has a polarizing effect!” Quite true.

But Netscape was a worthy opponent, blessed with enormous
advantages. It made the first popular browser, which quickly
achieved nearly unanimous usage. Browsing was understood on
Netscape's terms. The whole company took sides with the Net, which
offered enormous strategic advantages in an increasingly Net-based
business world. And Netscape used some of those advantages very
cleverly.

Unfortunately, they got caught up in the war story.

By the time Microsoft noticed that the Net mattered, the
press had already cast the company in the Evil Empire role it had
done much to earn, thanks to its merciless (or, in Gates' own
words, “hard core”) marketing.

Here's how it looked to me in early '96, when I wrote about
it for a web 'zine:

I learn from the papers that the desktop world
has fallen under the iron grip of the most wealthy and powerful
warlord in the galaxy. With boundless greed for money and control,
Bill Gates of Microsoft now seeks to extend his evil empire across
all of cyberspace.

The galaxy's only hope is a small but popular rebel force
called Netscape. Led by a young pilot (Marc Andreessen as Luke
Skywalker), a noble elder (Jim Clark as Obi-wan Kanobe) and a cocky
veteran (Jim Barksdale as Han Solo), Netscape's mission is joined
by the crafty and resourceful Java People from Sun.

“MICROSOFT TAKES WAR TO THE NET: Software giant
plots defensive course based on openness”

“MICROSOFT UNVEILS INTERNET STRATEGY: Stage set
for battle with Netscape”

“MICROSOFT, SUN FACE OFF IN INTERNET RING”

“MICROSOFT STORMS THE WEB”

The mind's eye conjures a vision of The Emperor, deep in the
half-built Death Star of Microsoft's new Internet Strategy, looking
across space at the Rebel fleet, his face twisted with contempt.
“Your puny forces cannot win against this fully operational battle
station!” he growls.

But the rebels are confident. “In a fight between a bear and
an alligator, what determines the victor is the terrain,” Marc
Andreessen says. “What Microsoft just did was move into our
terrain.”

And Microsoft knows its strengths. December 7th,
The Wall Street Journal writes, Bill Gates
“issued a thinly veiled warning to Netscape and other upstarts
that included a reference to the Pearl Harbor attack on the same
date in 1941.”

Exciting stuff. But is there really a war going on? Should
there be?

No, but both Microsoft and Netscape operated on exactly that
metaphor. And at first, Netscape used it brilliantly.

One extremely clever move was buying, opening and
ubiquitizing LDAP, the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol. In an
interview for Linux Journal in 1996, Craig
Burton said,

Microsoft built its entire services strategy on
what it thought was a titanium vise. One side was an
object-oriented file system called OSS which collapsed the
directory into the file system. This was Cairo (now Windows 2000).
The other side was a distributed application development framework
called OLE (now ActiveX), which they owned lock, stock and barrel.
They would squeeze those together and the Netscapes of the world
would squoosh like jello. But the Internet blew the jaws of that
vise apart. When Microsoft tightened the jaws of that vice, they
bent wide open. The world has shifted, and Microsoft is not going
to dominate it.

LDAP was a strategic move that helped shift the world.

For a year or two, Netscape looked like it could do no wrong.
It was a Miata being chased down a mountain road by a tractor
trailer. As long as it moved fast and looked ahead, there was no
problem with the truck behind. But at some point, Netscape got
fixated on the rear-view mirror. That's where they were looking
when they drove off the cliff.

Why did they do that?

They forgot where they came from: the hacker
community that had for years been developing the Net as a free and
open place—one hospitable to business, but not constrained by
anybody's business agenda. The browser was born free, like Apache,
Sendmail and other developments that framed the Net's
infrastructure. The decision to charge for the browser—especially
while still offering it for free—put Netscape in a terminal
business from the start.

They got caught up in transient market's fashions,
which were all about leveraging pre-Web business models into an
environment that wouldn't support them. Mostly, they changed the
browser from a tool of Demand (browsing) to an instrument of
Supply. They added channels during the “push” craze. They
portalized their web site. They turned the location bar into a
search term window for a separate domain directory, to be populated
by the identities of companies that paid to be put there (a major
insult to the user's intentions). Worst of all, they bloated the
browser from a compact, single-purpose tool to an immense
contraption that eventually included authoring software, a
newsgroup reader, a conferencing system and an e-mail client—all
of which were done better by stand-alone applications.

They became arrogant and presumptuous about their
advantages. At one point, Marc Andreessen said an OS was “just a
device driver”.

Their engineering went to hell. By the time
Netscape was sold (at top dollar) to AOL, the dirty secret was that
its browser code was a big kluge and had been for a long time.
Jamie Zawinski (one of the company's first and best-known
engineers) put it bluntly: “Netscape was shipping garbage, and
shipping it late.” Not exactly competitive.

They lost touch with their first and best market:
those customers who had actually paid for that damn browser.

It was painful to watch. Netscape was family for me (a close
relative was highly placed in the company). I was such a partisan
that I paid for that lousy browser the whole time they charged for
it, and I never got useful tech support. One time, a tech support
person told me the browser “didn't matter” because the big money
was all in server software.

Making browsers free (in cost, if not in code) was a
brilliant and insightful move by Microsoft that was utterly lost on
Netscape, which was unwilling to play smart chess by making a
reciprocal sacrifice. It was a suicidal mistake. The company we
loved and rooted for is now history.

Its ghost may still have revenge on Microsoft. It was
Netscape, more than any other company, that pushed the antitrust
case against Microsoft, and then served as the exemplary victim of
Microsoft's rapacious behavior. If the Feds bust up Microsoft,
Netscape deserves more credit than any other company.

But let's have some perspective here. What happened between
Microsoft and Netscape may make interesting stories, whether told
in terms of sports or war. But the story that matters can't be told
in those terms. It needs a better metaphor.

My favorite, of course, is conversation. As a topic of
conversation, Microsoft has been shrinking for the last five years,
regardless of what happened to Netscape or what revenge the Feds
carry out. There are too many other, more interesting subjects to
talk about.

Craig Burton, Brian Behlendorf and Tim O'Reilly all prefer
the environmental metaphor. That's what I've learned from
conversations with each of them. The wide-open world each of them
envisions is a habitat where development tools, methods and
strategies matter more than the companies that employ them.

Programmers like metaphors about buildings. They
“architect”, “design” and “build” with “tools”. And it is
individual programmers, more than any corporate supplier, who are
designing, architecting and building this new world, using free
software tools, Linux building materials and open-source building
methods.

If Microsoft can help, whether as one company or as two,
that's great. If they can't, it's probably because they're too busy
looking for enemies. And giving us less and less to talk
about.

Doc Searls
(doc@ssc.com) is Senior
Editor of Linux Journal and co-author of The
Cluetrain Manifesto.